


i laugh like me again, she laughs like you

by steeringwheeleater



Category: Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: M/M, Nonsense, Suggestive Themes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-22
Updated: 2019-07-22
Packaged: 2020-07-10 18:02:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 950
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19909915
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/steeringwheeleater/pseuds/steeringwheeleater
Summary: IM SOFTAND I DONT PROOFREAD!!!!!





	i laugh like me again, she laughs like you

**Author's Note:**

> i wouldn't know where to start  
> sweet music playing in the dark  
> be still my foolish heart  
> don't ruin this on me

It was at once like everything had changed and yet like nothing had changed at all. Like a great sigh from the lips of the universe, but that sigh was followed unceremoniously by another even breath. That was how it was, after the world didn't end. Even as they looked at each-other now, taking in the shapes and landmarks of faces and bodies that were so familiar to them, something behind the gaze was different, almost uneasy. 

It was the same when they walked through the doorway, when they threw themselves down onto a couch or an armchair and laughed at the fate of the world as they had hundreds-or-thousands of times before. Different when they found themselves avoiding eye contact like to do so was terrifyingly intimate and like they'd ever been afraid of such intimacy before. Neither breathed, and they had never needed to but it seemed very deliberate now, and maybe the universe had not yet taken that next inhale after all, and maybe the universe was waiting on the pin drop that would snap them back into the old reality. That was how it felt when Aziraphale suggested drink, and Crowley was quick to agree. What did they need otherwise? They were simply too sober to process that the apocalypse wasn't to happen, and once they took that leap they would find themselves back in their usual comfortable coexistence. Breaths would be had, again. After the booze. 

So they drank. Crowley poked fun at the horsemen. Aziraphale poked slightly harsher fun at the horsemen. Crowley snickered. It was good. And then they lapsed into silence, finally meeting and holding eyes: Crowley from beneath his fringe, leaning back in his chair with his head hanging low like a man in a stupor, and Aziraphale very straightforwardly over the glass which he drank from. 

Aziraphale made another suggestion, then: to listen to music. A celebration, to the continued existence of the world. After tearing his eyes away Aziraphale made no show of choosing a record from his collection, simply setting the needle down on whatever he'd left there the day before and watching while it crackled to life (watching it, instead of watching Crowley). The tune was old and slow and Crowley disliked it immediately, but as it continued to play he felt the tension spool out of his shoulders and he let his eyes fall shut in the greatest comfort he'd felt all evening. Without the burden of silence he could pretend that all of the breaths in the world passed between them without ever addressing what had held them up to begin with. It was terrible. It was routine. It had never been this present.

Aziraphale hadn't moved from his place near the record player, but as Crowley was no longer watching he'd begun to stare, himself. The demon's fingers were moving almost rhythmically, tapping at the chair. 

Time passed slowly for a long while. Aziraphale had finally taken his seat again and he, too, eventually shut his eyes. 

And then he was opening his eyes, and Crowley was on his feet, swaying, fingers flexing at his sides like they knew that they should be touching something or somebody else. 

The feeling like a kept breath (which really had never gone away) overtook him while he watched the way Crowley's legs bent and turned, the minutest of movements coupled with the slow, dramatic tossing of his head. He was---

It was as if---

The bookshop was warm and the air was stirring around and between them in a way that would've been imperceptible if they weren't so focused on that in particular, and Aziraphale wet his lips before he crossed the floor and damned the _familiar-unfamiliar_ by taking beautiful Crowley into the circle of his arms and rocking forward into him. Crowley's head bent immediately into Aziraphale's shoulder and when he exhaled against the real physicality of him he knew that _this_ was the great bated breath and that everything before had been the past and that everything to come was what he should concern himself with. Arms around each-other they swayed and swayed and swayed, feeling the heat become stifling and the position become tiring but unwilling to separate. The music was quiet, and somewhere in Aziraphale's consciousness he became aware that the record was ending, but there had never been anything that mattered less in all of history when Crowley started to kiss him. Open-mouthed, like a desperate man, pressed to Aziraphale's shoulder, his chest, his throat and his jaw in no order and without precision, just the way that he should have expected them. Crowley's hands were buried beneath his coat and against his back, and as he continued to lavish the angel Aziraphale held Crowley's shoulders in his own steady hands. 

Some would say that to be kissed by a demon was a hideous thing, by all accounts shameful and without grace, but when their lips finally met it felt, as a rush of air, perfectly holy. 

And then to keep kissing him, and to hold him against his skin until it felt like they might never come apart again, more divine still. Aziraphale brought Crowley to the wall and kissed him and opened him, holding him up while many more breaths and sighs that rattled and reshaped the world passed between them. Hundreds of imagined losses and the triumph of continuing to be, and continuing to be _together,_ spoken in hitches of breath and with possessive fingers. And later, in a chilling heap on the floor, they would each individually wonder at how it took the near end of the world to bring them here. It had never been very different.

**Author's Note:**

> oh i went Overboard. oh fuck it's all commas. oh shit i slipped and my purple prose fell out of my pockets and it all landed in this sick alphabet soup. if this is incoherent i can't even care im too busy being tender. ill be gone now into the woods where i will live and die thinking softly and fondly of men in love.


End file.
